Back in the days it was probably 7 bits, but the word size is not that important. The problem still exists today with a modern 64 bit computer: Even if a syste

Back in the days it was probably 7 bits, but the word size is not that important. The problem still exists today with a modern 64 bit computer: Even if a system internally can store a timestamp with nanosecond precision since the beginning of the universe, all that precision is lost when communicating with another system if it must send the timestamp as a six character string formated as "yymmdd" in ASCII.